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Muhammad Huzaifa
Name: Muhammad Huzaifa
CMS no: 22144
Cambridge Analytica data scandal
Cambridge Analytica was a British political consulting firm which combined data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process. It was started in 2013 as an offshoot of the SCL Group. The company was partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes.
In March 2018, multiple media outlets broke news of Cambridge Analytica's business
practices. The New York Times and The Observer reported on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data breach, in which the company used, for political purposes, personal information acquired about Facebook users by an external researcher who claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes. Shortly afterwards, Channel 4 News aired undercover investigative videos showing Nix boasting about using prostitutes, bribery sting operations, and honey traps to discredit politicians on whom it conducted opposition research, and
saying that the company "ran all of (Donald Trump's) digital campaign". In response to the media reports, the Information Commissioner of the UK pursued a warrant to search the company's servers. Face book banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform, saying that it had been deceived. On 23 March 2018, the British High Court granted the Information Commissioner's Office a
warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's London offices.
The personal data of approximately 87 million Facebook users were acquired via the 270,000
Facebook users who explicitly chose to share their data with the app "this
is your digital life". By giving this third-party app permission to
acquire their data, back in 2015, this also gave the app access to information
on the user's friends network; this resulted in the data of about
87 million users, the majority of whom had not explicitly given Cambridge
Analytica permission to access their data, being collected. The app developer
breached Facebook's terms of service by giving the data to Cambridge Analytica.